Note that the Drupal 7 version is actually Acquia Drupal, not a standard Drupal distribution. Acquia Drupal includes 30 very popular modules for building big sites. Acquia is only one of over 500 available Drupal distributions.

Click on the Web Platform tab to view the Frameworks and Runtime subsection. Check the box next to PHP.

Under the Web Applications tab on the left, select Acquia Drupal. Click the Install button.

You will see a screen revealing everything that’s about to be installed. The Installer will grab any necessary component for you if it detects that one is missing from your selection, such as MySQL.

You will also see the Installation confirmation screen. Review the license terms of all the software components and click I Accept.

If you are installing MySQL, you will be prompted to enter a password for your root user. If MySQL was already installed, you will be prompted to enter your password to allow the Web PI to create your applications’ databases.

If prompted, restart your machine.

When the downloads and installations are complete, create your databases and database users for Drupal by filling in the form fields, which will save you time by not requiring you to update your databases and edit your configuration files manually.

Click through to the next screen to view a summary of what has been installed. Under the Drupal application will be a Launch link that will open your default web browser to the installation page (install.php for Drupal). From there you can launch Drupal.

Advanced Installation

Web Server

Drupal can be used with Microsoft Internet information Services (IIS) or with Apache/NGINX.

Warning:The only production ready web server for Windows is IIS from Microsoft. Both Apache and Nginx can be used for development purposes and might be able to handle brochureware, but are NOT recommended for production usage

There are several resources that are available to you to get Drupal up and running on IIS. A search on the Drupal.org forums will usually pull up quite a number of resources. Here are a few other resources to help you get started:

Xamp

If you want a quick set of instructions to follow, go to Simple install of Drupal on XAMPP. XAMPP from Apache Friends is the easiest way to get everything (Apache, PHP and MariaDB) on a Windows machine (XP and Vista). It is installed in a few minutes and you can start developing right away.

Extract the XAMPP files to a drive by double-clicking the XAMPP self-extracting zip archive. In the Extract to:box, type C:\ (or click the button on the right to select your C:\ drive). Click the Extract button.

Once the files are extracted, open the extracted folder C:\xampp and run setup_xampp.bat.

Restart MariaDB in the control panel by clicking the Stop button next to MariaDB, then the Start button again.

Extract Drupal files to the C:\xampp\htdocs folder. It would be easier for future use to rename the folder “Drupal”. Open the “Drupal” folder and copy the default.settings.php file to the same folder. Rename it settings.php. Open settings.php with Wordpad and type in $db_url = ‘mysql://root:admin@localhost.drupal’;. Then scroll down and enter $base_url = ‘http://localhost/drupal’;.

Install your Drupal site and configure.

FusionLeaf Stack

FusionLeaf Stack is a preconfigured web stack which allows you to run Drupal very quickly without have to install or configure any additional software. FusionLeaf Stack makes it very easy to test Drupal without wasting any time trying to follow complicated tutorials. It includes Nginx, MySQL, PHP, and Memcached - Full instructions can be found here.

Note: Be sure to change the default MySQL password, prior to setting up Drupal, to help prevent unauthorized access if your website will be public facing.

I am in the same situation, the web platform installer is garbage for any sort of production ready usage. I just finished using the web platform installer to install to a temporary location then edited the settings.php file to point at my real database, then copied the site from the temporary machine to my real IIS install. Seemed to work okay but I do get errors about C:\Windows\Temp being unavailable and there was a deprecated function call in one of the acquia modules. I think I am going to redo everything following this guide that I found as I am not sure I need or want all the acquia stuff:http://chrislarson.me/content/chris-larson/installing-drupal-iis-microso...